


built my life around you

by palaces_outofparagraphs



Series: in memoriam [1]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Grief, Loss, Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-03
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2020-06-03 02:57:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 12,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19454893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/palaces_outofparagraphs/pseuds/palaces_outofparagraphs
Summary: (the moment's when you're in so deep / it feels easier to just swim down)fred dies, the town mourns.





	1. archie

**Author's Note:**

> this is a piece very close to my heart and my attempt at writing something in luke's honor. i really hope you enjoy it.

_ archie _

Jughead is the first person he calls.

There are other people he should call, other people who have made him and Mom promise that they would be the first on the other end, other people who are sitting up waiting, anxiously. He knows Alice Cooper has all but demanded that she’s the first point of contact on this. He knows FP, all shaking hands and roughly swiped away tears, has been waiting by the phone for maybe forty eight hours now. Betty needs to know. Veronica needs to know. Hell, Reggie made him swear he would call at the first sign of news. Aunt Mathilde needs to know. So many people are waiting for the news, waiting for good news, praying on their knees that the phone call bound for them now won’t ever come, but at ten past three in the morning the doctors call it and Mary is crying in a way Archie never wanted to see his mother cry, and Grandma is holding onto her with one hand and still holding Dad’s wrist, cold now, in the other, and within half an hour he’s in the hallway with the same cup of vending machine coffee he’s had all night, and his cell phone is pressed against his cheek.

“Arch - ”

“Jug.” He hasn’t cried yet. “Jug - he’s gone.”

Jughead curses, low and sharp, into the phone, and his voice breaks into sobs before his string of obscenities is complete, and all he can say is  _ he was supposed to make it. _

It’s all Archie’s been able to think too, for the past half hour and for the past forty eight hours before that. They thought he was going to make it. Everyone thought he was going to make it, that’s why everyone went home, FP and Alice with Jughead and Betty, Veronica and the football team and everyone except Archie and his mom and his mom’s mom. Because he was going to make it. Everyone was going to be back visiting in the morning when the doctors promised,  _ promised  _ he would be waking up. 

“They  _ promised, _ ” says Archie, and the sob rips his throat open.

\--

So Jughead comes with FP. They’ll call Alice in the morning. Archie wants to see Betty -in a removed kind of way, he’s not sure he’ll ever want anything properly ever again - but Mom doesn’t want to see anyone, but FP deserves to say goodbye, and Archie doesn’t think he’ll survive either if he goes another minute without seeing Jughead.

Except he doesn’t think he’ll survive anyway.

So it’s 5 a.m., the sun coming up, and Mom and FP and Grandma are doing all the grown up things you do in a hospital when someone dies, and Archie is leaning against Jughead’s shoulder, wearing his huge old Southside High hoodie that Jughead had brought for him earlier, when the world was still intact but it was clear Archie wouldn’t be going home that night. They’re sitting in a waiting area in the hospital further away from where it happened, from where the world ended. They’re sitting by big glass windows but they’re on the floor leaning against them instead of in the nearby chairs, and the hospital is almost empty and it’s scary quiet and the sun is coming up and Dad is not there to see it, Dad will never see another sunset, Dad is dead and nothing in this god forsaken, damned world will ever make any sense ever again and he wants to be anywhere but here.

“I’m so sorry,” Jughead says for the thousandth time. His eyes are red with crying. Archie doesn’t remember the last time he saw Jughead cry this hard. Maybe third grade. Reggie Mantle gave him stitches and Jug never cried but he couldn’t help it on the way home from the hospital.

Dad had been in the car with them. He doesn’t remember the details of that day but he remembers his Dad. His entire childhood, Jughead’s entire childhood, his dad was there in the front seat. And now, just like that he isn’t.

“I’m so sorry, Arch,” says Jughead. Archie is still leaning against him with his entire weight. He doesn’t think there’s anything else holding him up right now. “I’m so - you don’t deserve this.”

“Neither do you, Jug,” says Archie, because he feels in his chest like Jughead’s lost something too, like maybe Jughead feels the way he does right now. Maybe that’s why Jughead is the only person in the world he can ever fathom speaking to ever again. “I don’t know what - ” his voice catches. He doesn’t want to start crying again. He’s been crying forever, it feels like, and now by the windows at sunrise there is a respite where he doesn’t feel like he can, doesn’t feel like he can do anything anymore, but if he starts again he’ll never stop. “I just don’t know what I’m going to do without him.”

Jughead doesn’t say anything. There aren’t any answers. 

“And Jug, I just,” he gets off his shoulder a second, turns to face him, something like terror shaking in his voice, “Jug, what if it’s my fault?”

“Arch,” says Jug, his voice so gentle even though there is no gentleness left in the world, no tenderness to speak of, even though everything good died with his father in the hospital room at ten past three in the morning. “Arch, there’s no way in hell.”

“It might have been though,” says Archie, swallowing hard, “I’ve put him through so much - so  _ much  _ the past few months, years, what if, what if I - ”

“Arch, it came out of nowhere,” says Jughead, soft even though there is no softness left in the world, even though anything approaching soft died with his father in the hospital room at ten past three in the morning. “It came out of nowhere. It wasn’t because of you.”

It isn’t true but Archie doesn’t have any fight in him. He’s is leaning against Jughead again, eyes closed. The brutality of all of this, the violent pain that is accompanying every breath he takes now, every breath in a world without his dad, it’s all too much and he doesn’t understand how he can be expected to -

how he can be expected to  _ survive - _

At some point the brutal pain of breathing gives way to tears, and Jughead wraps an arm tight around him. Archie remembers when they rescued him from prison a thousand years ago, falling through a hole to nowhere and Jughead meeting him at the bottom and holding onto him just like this. He remembers that feeling of coming home, safe, the world a mess and his side still bleeding but Jughead hugging him and knowing he would see his father soon.

He remembers that feeling so sharply it’s like it’s stabbing him in the side and he’s never, ever going to feel it again.


	2. FP

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> FP, in the days before the funeral.

_ FP _

_ lost in their overcoats waiting for the sun _

In the days that follow, FP drinks coffee and waits for the phone to ring.

The house, Alice’s house, is quieter, emptier than it ever was before. Gladys is home, and she is in the periphery of life. He’s technically glad to see her but there isn’t any room for it in him anymore. She’s taking care of Jellybean, taking care of the house, taking care of their lives again, as he and Jughead sit at the kitchen table and waiting for Fred to come back.

He doesn’t, of course, he won’t. There are three days between Archie’s phone call from the hospital in the middle of the night and the funeral. The first day he spends with Mary, and it’s all right, it’s the semblance of all right, because he’s taking care of her, his Red, bringing back memories of being twenty and all of them newlyweds and laughing in the backyard, memories that burn but he has to take care of Mary. Fred would want, need him, to take care of Mary.

After the first day, Mary takes Archie home. Jughead spends nights at the house, staggering in at five in the morning, red eyed, no sleep. Gladys appears at some point from nowhere at all, Jellybean throwing herself into her mother’s arms, and she keeps telling Jughead to go to bed. FP isn’t quite sure of how things are connected anymore; there was the hospital, Mary, and then the kitchen table. And then there are two days until the funeral, and there’s the kitchen table and he isn’t sure how he gets from one place to another, how time vaults from one event to the next, because it doesn’t make any goddamn sense that events and places and all the other components that compose reality can continue to exist when Fred is  _ gone,  _ snatched from the continuing world, stamped out. 

It doesn’t make  _ sense.  _

So he sits at the kitchen table with his boy, and he drinks coffee, and he wants to be blackout drunk passed out in the middle of nowhere with an alarming, dizzyingly compulsive urgency. He needs to drink. Needs to forget. Needs to not be here, not be conscious, not watching as the hours pass by in a world where Fred Andrews isn’t  _ here _ .

The only thing stopping him is his boy, red eyed, mourning the loss across the kitchen table from him. Mourning the loss of a man who FP knows not so deep down was so much more of a father to him than he ever was. Mourning the loss of Riverdale itself, the heart and soul of the town, the seam running down everything and everyone, weaving everyone together. Mourning the loss of his childhood as he knew it because for all the world it’s over now.

FP sits at the kitchen table and does not drink anything but coffee and mourns his own.


	3. betty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Betty, planning and attending the funeral.

_ betty _

The funeral is not what he would have wanted.

She helps organize it, of course; she’s Betty Cooper, always first to volunteer and raise her hand and bring in a batch of cookies whenever the hell anyone needs a batch of cookies. Jughead calls her around 5 am, after Archie has fallen into an almost sedated sleep against his shoulder, reportedly, to tell her the news. She hasn’t slept all night and when the phone ring she knows it in her chest, a foresight she’s never felt in her life before.

_ he’s gone,  _ and he says, and she doesn’t have anything in her, doesn’t have it in her to curse or to cry or to make a sound. 

She and her mom go to see Mary in the morning and it’s like the world’s ended and she doesn’t know how the hell to exist in such a scenario so she does what she does best: volunteers, organizes, coordinates, takes charge. This time -- his funeral.

And yet she knows, on the day they bury him, it is nothing like what he would have wanted, because Fred wouldn’t want anyone to be organizing his funeral. Fred would want to be here, alive, and he wouldn’t want Betty and Jughead to be holding Archie up on either side, and he wouldn’t want Mary to be sobbing into FP’s shoulder, and he wouldn’t want Gladys, white lipped and arms folded.

Betty sees her in the church, near the back, and wonders absently why she isn’t sitting with FP, and wonders absently about the connection between Jughead’s absentee mother and Archie’s steadfastly there father. The roles reversed now: Gladys all too solidly here, a vague reminder of the goddamn  _ insanity  _ of everything that happened Before, and Fred gone, gone, gone.

It isn’t real. It can’t be real. That’s what she says to herself, again and again and again, because she thinks if she believes any of this, even for a minute, she’ll crumple and then there won’t be anyone standing left at all. She’ll crumple and Jughead will crumple and then Archie will crumple, and if none of the three of them are standing there won’t be anything left at all. Veronica will stay standing, because Veronica is still here, clutching Archie’s hand, but it’s different, for Veronica. Veronica doesn’t feel like this one the way they do.

_ he’s gone,  _ Jughead had said. She hadn’t really believed it at the time. She didn’t really believe now.

And yet she had organized the funeral, she and her mother, with Archie’s mother and FP at the kitchen table with them but too knee deep in grief to agree or disagree with certain choices. The Cooper women dealt with grief the way they dealt with anything: voraciously ignoring the emotional fall out in favor of getting whatever needed to be done, done. 

(Juniper and Dagwood were still in foster care, no matter how hard they tried to get custody. Being the wife and daughter of a serial killer who hadn’t realized Polly was being indoctrinated the past few years just wasn’t a good look. Betty would stare at the dirt underneath her fingernails and think about how in one fell swoop, her entire family had collapsed; her dad dead almost by her own hand, Polly in rehab, the babies in care, her mother crazy - well, that was the same, at least.)

And always next door there was Fred Andrews, taking care of Archie since he’d gotten out of prison, taking care of whoever else breezed through his kitchen or spent a night on his floor. The knot tying together the loose ends that comprised the town. The quiet fallback of Betty’s very existence was dinner at the Andrews’.

She stands in the church, hot and crowded, a stuffy June afternoon, packed with seemingly the whole town, swaying back and forth to the music she and her mother had overlaid above a slideshow of Fred’s life. The pictures led the audience through his Fred’s life, laying him out from a blue eyed grinning boy with beautiful curls, jeans ripped at the knee, an arm thrown around Alice, an arm thrown around FP; to a broody teenager who looked like something off a drama, illicit cigarette poking out of an incorrigible grin, an arm thrown around Alice, an arm thrown around FP; to the prom, Hermione Lodge at his side dressed in black with the biggest eyes Betty has ever seen; to the beginning of Andrews’ Construction; a wedding picture; tiny baby Archie - and on and on and on, pictures collected from all over, seemingly everyone in town had something to give her. 

It wasn’t her best work, she observes almost detachedly. She had made better slideshows. This one went on too long. The transitions were tacky. The music didn’t quite match up to the different phases in life, and some of the pictures were even out of order, and there was no color scheme to speak of.

Billy Joel.  _ Uptown Girl _ plays as a series of snapshots of him and Mary’s ramshackle backyard wedding scroll through, inciting a rumble of a laugh from a crowd desperate to forget they were at a funeral. Bruce Springsteen. Tracy Chapman’s  _ Fast Car,  _ fading out as the last picture of him lingers. Jughead had taken it long lens, arm outstretched to capture him, Archie, and Fred all in a row in the front seat of Fred’s truck, Fred wearing glasses, staring out a window, laughing at something he couldn’t talk about anymore _. _

She stands in the church and desperately misses her own dad, who would know what to say.

\--


	4. reggie

_ reggie: _

Aside from Jason’s - which he can’t think about today, because he can’t cry here, today, now, in front of his father, in front of the town - Reggie only remembers attending one other funeral, and he doesn’t remember giving a damn at the time, but when they’re at the cemetery after and Fred Andrews, closest thing to a decent father figure anyone in this goddamn town has ever known, it’s like his chest is splitting open, he didn’t think it was possible to feel worse than he did after Jason.

But then he never thought a world was possible without Fred Andrews, and yet here he stands, by his grave, and the unfairness of it makes him want to break glass crash cars hit someone hard enough to draw blood sink to his knees and sob for dear life.

He’s grown up at the edge of his seat, grown up waiting for the next blow to fall, grown up waiting for the world to end all over again. He has never known such a thing as a father’s love. This much he knows for a fact. He knows that’s why half the time he’s beating Andrews up and the other half he’s his best friend, because Archie Andrews has always has everything he’s ever wanted in spades without ever appreciating it. He knows that’s why he spent his whole life picking on Jughead, because he never wanted to admit that looking at Jughead, with his dark, inscrutable eyes and the quiet, pulsing anger was like looking into a mirror.

And if he couldn’t admit that he and Jughead came from the same place - came from an angry father, a swing and a miss counting as a good night - then he sure as hell wouldn’t ever be able to admit that Jughead did a damn better job of surviving it than Reggie.

He’s grown up the way kids like him grow up, and he doesn’t see the point in crying about it. Doesn’t see the point in dwelling on it. Doesn’t see the point in doing much else other than counting dollars and days until he can get the hell out of here, out of this town, and until then he knows that he can count on Fred Andrews to be a dad, generic brand, if he ever needs one, not that he does.

But the thing is, it was nice to have the option?

Ahead, Veronica stands, by Archie’s side, her hand in his. Archie is leaning onto Jughead and Betty, but his hand is in Veronica’s, and it makes Reggie’s chest tighten, even though he tries to ignore it, tries to focus on the main issue at hand, but he thinks -

He thinks -

He thinks she might have been the only thing he’s ever come close to loving and it makes him want to break glass crash cars hit someone hard enough to draw blood, drop to his knees and beg her to come back, and he wants -

he wants Fred Andrews to be alive.

Crystalline tears shimmer on Veronica’s cheeks, because she can make even that look beautiful; and, his dad is there, but what the hell is the point of any of it anymore?

He didn’t cry at Jason’s funeral but he’s crying now at the cemetery and he doesn’t think he’s ever going to be able to stop. 

\--

There’s a reception afterwards, if that’s what they’re called after weddings. It’s at the Andrews’ house, because  _ Mary Andrews is apparently the kind of woman who can host minutes after her husband’s cold.  _ It’s what his mom says anyway, but even her voice is quieter today. His mom never has anything nice to say about anybody, even though her sharp forked tongue all but vanishes when her father is around. Still she half-murmurs the sentiment in the passenger seat as they’re driving towards the Andrews’, and his dad - who’s eyes he felt burning into the back of his head during the funeral but who, blessedly, mercifully, this day brings forth one moment of peace and he, didn’t say anything - snorts slightly.

“As if you wouldn’t host if that was me in the grave?” his dad says, his voice light, making his mother’s snide comment about a widow into a lighthearted, also commiseratory remark. His dad somehow makes his own words lighthearted too, talking about his own funeral on the way back from another’s. His dad is good at what Ronnie would call  _ spin.  _ Sometimes his dad is so human he thinks he must be making up all the times he’s hit him, especially when the bruises fade and there’s nothing and no one to prove any of it happened. 

His mother snorts. “I’d leave it all to Reggie,” she says. “My boy would take care of me.”

They wait for him to say something but he doesn’t. He has nothing to say on the topic of his father’s eventual death, or on caring for a mother who never paid him the same courtesy. He thinks there must be something innately unjust, though, (the kind of thing Jones would say) about a world where his dad outlived Fred.

And he doesn’t even feel bad about thinking it. 

\--

“Kinda like Jason’s, huh?”

Moose is here, appearing as if from a confused blur. Reggie has missed Moose for a long time. Moose would have known what to say, about the whole Veronica thing. Moose always knew what to say.

Reggie snorts almost a laugh, his chest aching as he sips a cup of something red and sweet, wishing he was drunk. Wishing he was anywhere else. Wishing this, any of it, felt even remotely in the vicinity of real. Wishing the version of himself he showed the world, the version of himself unafraid of his dad, the version of himself who could and would survive anything, was the one attending the funeral.

“I wish he was here,” he says, and he doesn’t know if he means Jason or Fred or himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took so long to upload, hope you enjoyed <33


	5. mary

_ mary _

She holds the reception in her home - the home that was her’s, anywhere, before she left Fred and Archie here all on their own - right after the funeral, because she knows if Fred had outlived her - if the universe or God or whatever she believes in this week had been merciful - it was he would have done.

What no one tells you about losing your husband, she thinks almost absently, as she stands in the doorway of her kitchen or what used to be, watching mourners mill absently around her house, all of them looking uneasy, everyone looking like they’re waiting for Fred to come in, is that it’s not an awful lot different from  _ leaving _ your husband. She feels, on a far, far more grandiose scale, echoes of many of the same concepts of those first weeks alone in the Chicago apartment. Constantly measuring what she’s doing now to what she would be doing if she were with him. A feeling of being absolutely, unendingly untethered. Hollow loss.

But she could have moved back then.

The guilt comes now too, a version more centered around Fred than it was on Archie. In those days it was a struggle every day to force herself through a day where she had left her boy behind. And when she thought of Fred, it was with so much - so much sorrow, so much grief, so much fury, so much loss - but not guilt. Because a marriage was 50/50, and a divorce or a separation or a taking the Chicago job even though they both knew what it meant for her to take the Chicago job, had to be 50/50 too. Because she wasn’t leaving him, not really, and they both knew what she was really running from.

_ “You’re not leaving me,” he had said through the dark once, both of them pretending to be asleep. “You’re leaving this godforsaken town. So should I come with you, Mary? Is that what you want? Do you want me to leave too?” _

She hadn’t said a word. Maybe he really did believe she was asleep. Fred would never speak that way to her, after all, if he thought she was awake. She didn’t answer because they both knew the answer. Fred would never leave Riverdale. Fred couldn’t leave Riverdale.

And she couldn’t leave him, but she couldn’t stay in Riverdale. Her life had become a series of contradictions, the only thing grounding her the essentials: she loved Archie. She loved Fred. She needed to leave Riverdale. She always would. It was all true, and she thought she could take the Chicago job and figure it out. She thought they had time.

She thought they had  _ time. _

And now here comes the guilt, all the guilt she pretended was for Archie and Archie alone, overwhelming her. She never should have left him. She should have stayed. She should have made it work. She should have loved him more, and that wasn’t possible, because there was no way to love Fred more than she already did, but she should have loved him more anyway. Loved him enough to stay. Loved him enough to choose him over the Chicago job, over the dreams she whittled down to size at eighteen, to find some truth in that word she hated so much:  _ compromise.  _

All that and it still probably wouldn’t be enough, she thinks, but maybe that’s just her way of trying to absolve herself, since Fred never would be able to, now. All that and he probably still would have been miserable, she tells herself. Miserable and lonely and overworked and now, dead in his forties from a stroke that came out of nowhere. It came out of nowhere, they told her. And he was supposed to make it. He was supposed to make it. He was supposed to make it.

_ We’re so sorry, Mrs. Andrews. We did all we could. _

She had never gotten around to changing her name, legally. They had never been legally divorced. She was always going to come back. These were facts. She was always going to come back.

And now she never would.

Divorce, or separation, or leaving for the Chicago job without even talking about it much, Fred’s jaw going tight and his hand rigid on Archie’s shoulder watching her back out of the driveway in her tiny Mazda, was a lesson in balance. Every day away from him she would defend her actions to him in her head, as if he had ever asked. As if he had ever blamed her for a thing. All she wanted was absolution, was forgiveness. And she knew she had it already, because Fred, her Fred, couldn’t  _ not  _ forgive a soul. And yet.

And now she would never have it at all.

She felt like a stranger in her own home. A stranger at her own husband’s funeral reception. A stranger in this town, the town she had grown up in, the town she had gone to school in and left for college and come back for Fred and left again and come back for Fred. No one here had loved Fred like she had loved Fred. And yet they were more like him than she was. They were all people who stayed.

Her heart ached, the pain radiating down to the soles of her feet. But imagine what Fred had felt like. He had been alone when it had happened, called 9-1-1 and gasped his address into the phone minutes before Archie had come home from football practice to see him passed out on the kitchen floor. Her baby. She should have been there for them both.

_ Did you call for me, Fred?  _ He could handle most of what her mother would have classified as  _ domestic life _ on his own, she wasn’t and had never been a housewife. But injuries were one thing he was miserable with - his own, that was; he could take care of anyone else through anything, but if he so much as stubbed his toe he’d be calling for her, asking her to look at it and make sure it wasn’t broken, and never asking her to get a bandage or ice but looking so plaintively at his own foot that she would always do it anyway. She couldn’t imagine him seized with pain, with that terrible wrongness in his brain and body, and not calling out for her.

_ Did you call for me, my love? I should have come. _

_ Did you call for me, my love? I should always have stayed. _

\--

The house empties slowly. People leave things that are helpful, technically, but only feel like debris of the loss and buildup for a litany of future chores: casseroles and meals that she and Archie will have to reheat and then return the dishes, flowers to clip and put in water-filled vases, condolence notes that they will have to respond to with thank you notes. It seems unfair to give the grieving more tasks, but so is life, she supposes. 

She feels even more removed from the situation than she was during the funeral, beautifully arranged by Betty Cooper, who Fred always wanted to watch grow up and marry Archie; during the burial, where she absently watched Marty Mantle’s kid with his fists trembling at his side, wondering how anyone could allow Marty Mantle to outlive Fred; during the reception, where she lingered, aching and breathless and sorry, on the edge of her own home. Now that the house is empty and there’s nothing to do and too much to do and a life to live without Fred by her side, and who the hell is she to mourn a man she left behind?, she feels curiously as if the monologue running ceaselessly throughout her head all day, cataloging and characterizing and noting, has come to a halt.

Another similarity of leaving him for the first time. She’s stored up all the bits and pieces to share with him and there is no one to share them with.

The house empties until only she, Archie, FP, Alice Cooper, and both their kids are left. Her mother is still here, too, but she didn’t even have the strength for the reception, taking to bed as soon as they got home from the burial. Mom loved Fred like he was her son, even after the divorce. She didn’t deserve to bury him.

“Well,” says Alice, who is doing dishes at her sink without permission. Mary and Archie are at the kitchen table. Her son has the blank-eyed, sedated expression of a recent trauma victim. She supposes she must look similar. 

She reaches across the table and covers his hand with her own. He smiles at her, brave, and it makes her ache that he feels like has to. Her sight wavers for a second and he is five years old, kicking his legs at the kitchen table. 

Even then, Fred was better with him.

“Well,” echoes Mary. “You don’t have to do that, Alice.”

“Of course I do,” says Alice sharply. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Al,” mumbles FP. He is leaned against the fridge cross armed. 

“Sorry,” says Alice after a second.

“Don’t be,” said Mary. She swallows. “It’s just… you should both be getting home. I don’t want to be keeping you from your - your families.” This isn’t her world anymore. She and Fred split custody of their friends in the months building up to the divorce. and he got to keep both the Coopers, and especially Alice. FP was far from their life by then, but he had been more Fred’s than her’s for years.

“Can - uh - ” Archie speaks up for what feels like the first time all day and all the adults turn to look at him, making him flush slightly. It isn’t her imagination. He looks younger than he has in years.

He will be a senior in just over two months. Fred won’t be at his high school graduation.

“Can Betty and Jug spend the night?” he says, his voice quavering.

FP and Alice speak over each other giving their permission and okays and then both fall silent looking at Mary. She is still Archie’s mother, she thinks. Fred is gone and it feels like there is nothing rooting her to this earth but she is still Archie’s mother.

“Of course,” says Mary, because she would have said anything, at that moment, to make Archie feel anything other than the same avalanche of grief she has been buried under. She knows it’s a hopeless case, but she can try.

_ Did you call for me, my love? _

_ Can you hear me calling for you? _

  
  
  



	6. alice

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> miscarriage cw

_ alice _

Alice is still doing dishes. It’s a wonder how many people actually ate the catered food Mary had ordered for the reception, ruining her good plates. Alice hasn’t been been able to eat since the morning Betty got to the call from Jughead and came into her room crying, like she hadn’t since she was a very, very little girl.

In the split second before the news had spilled out all over her room and into her bed, Alice had forgotten, forgotten coming home from the hospital, forgotten breaking into pieces, forgotten all of the doctors’ promises that he would be okay, and she only saw Betty coming into her room crying like she was a little girl, and something like  _ gladness  _ rose in her heart. Glad that her daughter still needed her. Glad that she had at least one of them still, to hold in her arms.  _ Glad,  _ she really was awful, wasn’t she?

“Mom,” Betty had whispered, “Mom, Mom, he’s gone.”

“Oh,  _ Betty, _ ” Alice had said, her mind still catching up, the gladness lingering even as the realization, the grief crashed. “Oh, baby, come here.”

The gladness was lingering because Betty still needed her. She crawled into bed with her and cried, and Alice held her. Her emotions had been somewhat off kilter for decades now, so she wasn’t surprised when the sorrow didn’t come, when the plunging feeling of loss didn’t come. She had spent too long practicing pressing her emotions behind frosted glass to be able to access anything right anyway, and if that wasn’t enough her year undercover would have been enough to throw her off base. So when she held Betty and told herself,  _ Fred Andrews is dead, I will never see him again, I will never have a coffee with him, I will never bring him a casserole, I will never compete with him decorating our houses for Christmas, he is gone, he is gone, he is gone,  _ and none of it registered and none of it sank through, she wasn’t surprised.

_ Betty needs me  _ felt more real, and then,  _ Fred will never hold Archie again.  _ It cracked the frosted glass and she took a shuddering gasp and held Betty closer, but it still didn’t feel real. It still doesn’t feel real. She can’t quite make it true.

They throw themselves into funeral preparations because it’s what Cooper women do, and all too quickly it’s all over and she is staring at the rest of her life without Fred or Hal and she doesn’t know when all the men around here started to die. Surely, they’re all too young to lose their husbands. The word  _ widow  _ is for someone much, much older, more and less capable at the same time, withered and grey, but she looks at Mary and down at her hands and thinks: we are widows.

FP is still living in her old house, and Betty and Alice have moved across town, to be close to both the rehabilitation center Polly is housed in and the foster home the twins are in. He goes home around midnight, making Mary promise to call if she needs anything, since he has a wife and daughter waiting. Alice doesn’t have anyone waiting, though. And she’s glad Betty is spending the night here, with Archie and Jughead - it will help her as much as it will help him - but she can’t quite bear the idea of the empty, creaking apartment, cold and drafty even in June.

She finishes washing the dishes and sits down across the table from Mary. Archie, Jughead, and Betty have gone upstairs. Mary is looking just slightly past her, out the window, with the blank, sedated look of a recent trauma victim. 

Alice has seen enough of those to be sure.

“I’m really sorry,” she says. “I’m really, really sorry.”

Mary meets her eyes, gives her a slight, struggling smile. “Come on,” she says. “I don’t deserve that.”

Alice raises her eyebrows. “What?”

“I know you’re thinking it,” says Mary, her voice strange. “I left him, right? I left him. We split custody of our friends, and you and Hal got Fred, and I’m the witch who left town and so what the hell am I mourning about?”

“No, Mary,” says Alice, out of her element, out of her depth, wishing Fred was here. “No, no one thinks that.”

“Don’t you?” says Mary. “You should. I left him.”

Alice sees the fault lines in her face, sees her about to break, and presses a hand on top of her’s. “Mary,” she says.

“I left him,” says Mary, her voice cracking,  _ pure and clean as the cry of the baby,  _ and Alice thinks of Sylvia Plath in the heartbeat before Mary dissolves into sobs, wrenching and godforsaken at the kitchen table. She rises and moves to sit next to her and holds her like she held Betty last night. She has lost Hal five different times over the past year and it never got easier, and the memory of it shatters the cracked glass and tears slide down her old cheeks as she holds Mary at the kitchen table, feeling far too young for any of this, feeling far too old for any of it, trying to make room inside the depth of the word  _ widow.  _ Widows, one comforting another, mired in their guilt, in their longing, in their waiting, in their utter, hollow loss.

\--

She ends up sleeping on the sofa that night, after making sure Mary eats something and gets to bed, after checking in on Archie and Betty and Jughead crammed into his room, all three of them sleeping on the air mattress on the bed, Archie sandwiched between Betty and Jug like for all the world they’re six. In any other universe Alice would have objected with every cell in her body to even the idea of her daughter sleeping in the same bed as two adolescent boys, one of whom was her boyfriend, but the world has turned upside down.

It’s not only because of her own grief, her own loss, not only because she has no one to go home to. It’s mostly for Mary, who shouldn’t wake up to an empty house. Or she wouldn’t, because her own mother is here, and so is her son, and Betty, and Jughead. But still, she doesn’t want Mary to wake up to an empty house. She knows that once you lose your husband, no matter how many people you fill it with, your house feels empty for days and days and weeks and months and years.

She pulls the afghan closer over her chest, memories coming in droves; echoes of movie nights at the Andrews’, charades after dinner, babies born and babies lost. Mary lost two babies, miscarried, before Archie - Alice isn’t even sure Archie knows. Fred lit candles on what would have been their birthdays ever year. Who would remember them now?

Alice closes her eyes, the exhaustion of the past year settling into her chest, compressing her lungs. She had handled Hal’s betrayal and loss so badly, and she knows she can’t treat this like a second chance. 

She was  _ trying.  _ The whole time she was trying. But she got in too deep too fast, intoxicated on the son coming back into her life, intoxicated by the idea of solving everything, fixing everything. And if it meant pushing Betty away, she told herself that this was for her daughter’s own good. Both her daughters’. And her son too.

She thought maybe she could have everything all over again, her daughters, her grandchildren, and the son she thought was gone forever. In a place she didn’t recognize, she knew she thought somehow, all this would bring Hal back too.

And to what end? The Farm has been shut down, yes. Edgar Evernever is in jail. Her son is in her life, she’s getting to know him, it feels like a miracle, yes. But she had almost lost Betty forever. She doesn’t know if Polly would ever be the same. She can’t have the twins, at least, not yet. She doesn’t have Betty back all the way either. She doesn’t know if she ever will.

Hal is still gone. Now he’s dead.

And Fred is gone now too.

So to what end has she spent the year? All her years? What if the only good person in this town, what if the only person who’s life had meant anything, had been Fred, and what are they going to do now that he’s dead?

Her thoughts were getting out of control, twisting and warping reality, vines with fangs sinking into her chest. It was too hot on the sofa, she kicked off the afghan, and then too cold, yanking it back desperately.

She thinks of the two babies Mary lost. She’s never talked to her about it, barely even discussed it with Fred. Mary was tight lipped and pale faced for weeks and months after, but she never said anything about it besides  _ it wasn’t meant to be.  _ She must have mourned - they were three months along each time, long enough to make it feel real. But then, who knows. Maybe it didn’t hurt, or the hurt was absorbed by having Archie. Fred had wanted a whole houseful of kids, but when it became clear that wasn’t going to happen he had devoted himself to Archie with the same love he would’ve spread over six or seven kids. Mary must have as well.

How bizarre, to grow up with someone, live next door to them for so much of your adult life, and not know how they felt about their two miscarriages. Earlier that night in the kitchen was the first time Alice had ever seen Mary cry.

She takes a long, shuddering breath, in and out. She just wants to fix this. She just wants to fix all of it.

She just wants Fred back.


	7. betty (reprise)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i wrote these chapters during the summer and now rereading them in quarantine has me feeling some kinda way.. i miss hugging.. anyway hope i can bring some peace to any of y'all in these crazy times

_ betty _

The three of them are shoulder to shoulder on the floor of Archie’s room, like they were when they were kids, sleeping over at Archie’s house. It makes Betty think of brighter days, softer times. Fred was always down the hall or in the kitchen. She remembers the first sleepover she had at the Andrews’ when she was six, creeping into the kitchen at midnight with a tummy ache because she missed her mom. Fred had been there, and he’d told her very seriously she could go straight home if she wanted, but in the morning he was making  _ magic  _ chocolate pancakes, and in the meanwhile she could have some of his  _ magic _ hot chocolate, if she promised not to tell Archie and Jughead he’d let her have a sip.

It really had been magic, both the hot chocolate and the pancakes. She had ended up staying the night. Fred had winked at her in the morning.

She remembers her last sleepover there, too, when she was nine, just about pushing the limit for how old Alice Cooper allowed her to spend the night at a boy’s, even if that boy was Archie. There had been nights spent in the treehouse too, frequently with Jughead, but there was something about sleepovers at the Andrews’, a feeling of infinite summer, infinite childhood, that had never been replicated.

And now here, again, the floor of his room, spread out on the old camper sleeping bag. The bed would’ve been too small and Archie needed them close as possible, so they lie here together, seventeen, all of them long arms and legs and feeling young and old and like this is okay and like nothing ever will be ever again or at least, that’s how Betty feels. Crammed together shoulder to shoulder, Betty and Jughead on either side of Archie. The room smells of summertime and dust and something that might be loss.

“The funeral was beautiful, Betty,” Archie says, after a while. “You did such a good job.”

She stares up at the ceiling and briefly squeezes his hand. “That means a lot, Arch,” she said says quietly.

“I miss him,” Archie says a moment later. “I miss him so much and it’s just the first week.”

“Me too,” says Jug, soft. “It doesn’t seem real.”

“I just, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Archie says. “I don’t know what to do.”

“We’re here, Arch,” says Betty. It’s all she can say. “We’ll be here for you always. Veronica too.” Veronica had gone home with her mom because Hermione had been almost in hysterics, in a way Betty secretly thinks was almost rude. Her mom, after all, had kept it together.  _ Mary  _ had kept it together. But Hermione, her eyes huge like in Fred’s prom pictures, had cried so hard she’d practically stopped breathing, and Veronica with her crystalline tears practically frozen on her face had driven her home.

Archie makes a sound like a sob. They’re all more honest in the dark.

Jughead shifts slightly, his arm inching around Archie’s. “It’s going to be okay,” he says, his voice quiet, bracing. “It is. We’re going to be okay.”

“But I don’t know how I’m going to do this. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Betty rests her head against his shoulder, which isn’t as hard as you’d think it would be, lying down. “Me neither,” she says, talking about her own dad and his dad and the world itself.

Archie goes quiet after that, they all do. It is enough just to be close in the dark, their presence alone as much of a comfort as can be drawn on a night like this, but it is a very long time until his breathing goes even. She’s surprised it does at all, but she supposes he must be exhausted, bone tired.

She and Jughead lie in the dark for a long time, past Alice coming in and checking on them,in silence. Perhaps it is silence for commemoration, or for consideration, or because they, too, are bone tired.

“How much do you want to bet my mom’s asleep on the couch?” says Betty at 4 a.m, soft through the dark.

Jughead twists, raising himself up slightly on his elbows to see her over Archie’s sleeping form between them. “I never bet on a sure thing,” he whispers.

It would be inappropriate to laugh, but Betty does anyway, and it’s worth it if only to see the corners of Jughead’s lips turn up ever so slightly. “She thinks we’re asleep,” she says.

“yeah,” he says. “Surprised she didn’t pick you up and take you downstairs with her.”

“Right,” says Betty. “She really saw me lying in bed with my boyfriend and Archie and just.. went back downstairs.”

“I guess it’s end times,” says Jughead. This time Betty doesn’t laugh. She doesn’t think he’s joking.

They are quiet, and then speak at the same time.

“How are we gonna - ”

“What is Archie - ”

They smile at each other, a little bit. Jughead starts again. “What is Archie going to think when he sees Alice Cooper on his couch in the morning,” he whispers.

“What’s  _ Mary, _ ” says Betty. She doesn’t know when they started calling all the adults by their first names, but here they are.

“Veronica should have stayed,” says Jughead, coming off his elbow, dropping onto his back again. Betty wishes she could hold his hand, wishes she could bury her face in his chest and let the world around her dissolve

. “Yeah,” she says after a second. “But you know, her mom.”

“Yeah,” echoes Jughead. “But still.”

Betty is heavy at the thought of all the  _ but stills  _ the future is sure to hold. “I just miss him,” she says. “I just miss him so goddamn much.”

Jughead reaches across Archie’s chest, wrong as it feels to break past the barrier, and takes her hand tight in his for a second, knuckles entwined. Jughead’s hands are rough and chapped, and she always feels safe with her palm enclosed in his. “We’re gonna be okay.”

She holds his hand but doesn’t look at him, staring up at the ceiling. “Do you really believe that?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

\--

They must fall asleep at some point, because when she opens her eyes, the sun is shining. Archie’s head is crooked, lying haphazard on Jughead’s shoulder, and Jughead’s arms and legs are everywhere. She is similarly disheveled but curls up quickly. Sleeping next to her boys felt fine and normal last night in the wake of the hellish day, but it feels more significant that they’re all in fact seventeen and in different relationships in the light of day.

The sun is shining and Fred is still gone. It’s been four days now. 


	8. gladys

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> part of this chapter actually ended up coming true when they aired the memorial episode! a depressing thing to predict, and yet.

_ gladys _

She wakes up early the morning after the funeral. FP stumbled in around midnight the night before, reminding her of the last days before she left. He is snoring deeply next to her, the kind of snores that she used to sigh in relief at hearing because they were better than the constant, building fighting between them, the kind of fighting she didn’t want to think what it was doing to her kids, the kind of fighting she had sworn she would never have in her household the kind of fighting that had made her think maybe it was better, would be better, if she left, just left.

She turns over in bed so she isn’t facing him. She knows FP doesn’t think she understands, knows FP would rather spend these days with Alice and Mary and all the other people who did a better job of loving him, but what he doesn’t know is there’s a pain splitting her chest like she hasn’t felt in years and years. 

Lying on her side, she rests her hands on her ribcage the way they used to teach them to do in prenatal yoga when she was pregnant with Archie. It seems absurd that she has the memory of doing something like prenatal yoga. Certainly it is not a memory that fits the persona she is, that seems inconsistent with her entire past, present, future. But there was a stretch of time in her life where things were easier. When she and FP lived in more than the old trailer, still on the southside but in a house with a garden. When Mary and Fred were their best friends in the world, and she and Mary were pregnant at the same time, and Fred said why don’t you go to prenatal yoga too and he covered the checks for the classes and refused to hear anything about it.  _ Consider it our present to your little boy,  _ Fred would say, affectionately placing his hand on her stomach. She would’ve cut off anyone else’s hand if they’d tried that but it was okay with Fred. Fred loved her son, FP’s son, before he was even born, just as much as he loved his own

All of them newlywed laughing in the backyard, tied together with laughter and love and the bonds of being married to the person you loved more than anyone in the world. Mary and Gladys had next to nothing in common and yet looking back, looking back to before everything fell apart, it had never felt like that. They were bonded by their husbands, by the lives they were so proud to live, by their babies who they were so besotted with. And such babies, their names that seemed so right suddenly too big and important -  _ Forsythe  _ and  _ Archibald  _ became the affectionate gentle  _ Jughead  _ and  _ Archie.  _ Her baby, with big, serious eyes and a crop of black hair. He never cried. He only ever watched her with those big, big eyes.

She’s failed him a thousand times.

Her hands still on her ribcage, she takes a deep breath in, watching her hands rise, and lets it out slow. They fall. Fred, paying for her prenatal yoga. Fred, in high school, picking her up from a party she was too drunk, too young, too broken to be at. Fred, pushing her and FP into closets and cupboards and dances and dates, half the time so he could be alone with Mary without his best friend’s constant presence, but the other half because he knew Gladys, saw the hunger in her, reached out a hand and pulled her out of the darkness a million times. Fred, who used to go and talk FP down after she and her husband had had a fight, who would send FP back from the Andrews’ house with apologies and contrition, always bringing her husband back to her. Fred, who loved her son like he was her own. Fred, who she knows, took care of Jughead when neither she nor FP could.

She’d owed him so much. She had so much left to say to him, left to thank him for. She owned him one last dance in a suburban backyard, barefoot and laughing, swaying with her husband’s best friend. And now all at once he is past tense. All at once he is gone. She doesn’t know if her husband will ever be the same.

She doesn’t even know if he’s her husband anymore. 

It was Jughead who called her, six o’clock in the morning. She’d been posted up near Toronto, working under the table for a bed and breakfast, trying for the first time in a long time to make something close to an honest living. Her life was better, softer than it had been in a long time, even though she missed Jellybean like a limb - her boys too, of course, but she’d never lived without her jellybean. Still it was good, a time for restoration. She worked a variety of odd jobs around the inn, everything from customer service to the front desk to repairs and plumbing; anything she was needed for, at a fair rate plus tips, with room and board at a slashed price. She’d work long days and then sit on her little balcony watching the sunset with a beer. There was a lake a mile away that she would go to when a free afternoon opened up, watching the ducks drift along the glassy surface. She worked and thought and every day, wondered about calling home, and every day, put the phone down.

She was just waking up for the morning when her phone rang and her son’s name flashed across the front, and she picked up on the first ring trying to ignore her heart jumping into her mouth.

“Jug?”

“Mom,” said Jughead, in a voice he hadn’t used since he was very small, making him ache. “Mom, uh, I think you - if you could - ” his voice caught. “Mom, could you come home?”

Something she didn’t have a name for surged deep within her and she cleared her throat. “What’s wrong?” It came out too formal. She never knew how to love him right, not her dark haired baby who watched her with those big, serious eyes. She’d sworn she would do better with strawberry blond Jellybean, Jellybean who screamed her little lungs out, but all she’d ever done was fail her first baby, who’s childhood she’d let FP take apart, who’s childhood she’d taken apart herself, who she had left again and again and again.

“Mom,” he said again. Before she had left he’d called her  _ Gladys.  _ “Fred Andrews is dead.”

“What the  _ \-  _ ” good mothers didn’t curse on the phone with their sons but Fred Andrews was  _ dead  _ so she did.

“He had a stroke,” said Jughead, as if in a dream, Gladys sitting straight up in bed clutching the edge of her quilt. “And he was supposed to make it.” Her baby’s voice broke. Did he cry now, her beautiful, dark eyed baby who only ever watched her? “And he  _ died.  _ a few hours ago. Mom, Dad is a mess, I - ” he swallowed hard, tripping over the words. She filled in the blanks and didn’t make him say he needed her, or even wanted her.

“I’ll be down there by tonight,” she had said. “I’ll be down there by tonight.”

She didn’t know what she expected but she supposed all things considered she shouldn’t be surprised. FP is barely making eye contact, Jughead spends most of the time with Archie, Jellybean won’t leave her side. And Fred, incredibly, unbelievably, really is dead.

It isn’t that she didn’t believe her boy, on the phone with her, proving in some incredible, logic-defying way that deep down he really did need, or at least want, his mom sometimes (or at least that’s what she’s been telling herself, knowing the truth is less romantic, knowing she had let him down too many times, her dark-eyed baby boy watching her white-knuckle through the throes of post-natal depression that she didn’t have the words for, who had watched her as she had screamed until she was hysterical and her chest was heaving and FP  _ wasn’t hearing her anymore _ ) (oh, it wasn’t all beautiful in those days in the nice house closer to the northside, and she, FP, and Jughead were the only one who had borne witness) (how could she ever properly love a baby she had hurt that badly) (how did she have the right). Driving down from Toronto she chanted it to herself like a mantra, like a prayer, like she was trying to convince herself there was any truth in it at all.

_ Fred Andrews is dead. I will never see Fred again. _

_ Fred Andrews is dead. _

_ I will never see Fred again. _

And then she had arrived and she was at the funeral planned by Alice’s girl and you’d know it by looking at it. She watched the slideshow of his life and wished the kid had asked her to send some pictures in. She had some beautiful ones from a million years ago, of Fred laughing in the front seat of his very first car, picking her up from a thousand ill advised midnight adventures.

She supposes she’s no one’s first point of contact here in Riverdale. The thought, even though her heart left this town years ago, makes her want to cry, or maybe it’s losing Fred that makes her want to cry.

God, it isn’t that she didn’t believe it but it’s that he really  _ isn’t here. _

It’s not like they had kept in touch the past few years. But what she’d never told anyone was that when Fred had given up on FP for the last time, weary and exhausted and pushing his best friend away from him, Fred Andrews the kindest man he knew unable to see the good in the best friend he’d ever had (oh, it had been end times, end times) he hadn’t given up on her. They used to meet for coffee and lunch once in a while, his eyes sad, missing his best friend. She knew she shouldn’t meet the man who, as FP told it, had betrayed her husband on a deeper level than he thought possible. She thinks maybe that’s why she did it, or maybe she did it because Fred never let her leave without buying her a coffee and lunch and sending food home for Jughead and Jellybean and, more often than not, forcing at least a fifty dollar bill into her palm, saying  _ it’s on me, it’s on me, it’s the least I can do, Gladys. _

Or maybe she did it because he was Freddy Andrews, after all, someone who she could always call on the pick her up in the middle of the night. And now, all at once he is gone. The last time she called him was to pick up Archie, in the middle of the night, a conversation that feels like a million years ago and five minutes ago. 

She rolls over in bed, seized suddenly by the urge to be held, the urge not quite beat back by a quiet terror of rejection, and gently nudges FP.

A few seconds later he opens his eyes, red and bloodshot. “Glad,” he mumbles, and then, “baby, come here.”

She doesn’t deserve it but she rolls over again until she is pressed up against him and he is holding her. She presses her head to his shoulder and feels him shake with sobs against her, closing her eyes against the coolness of her husband’s ancient black tee shirt.

One more time, a parting gift perhaps, Fred has brought her husband back to her.


	9. jughead

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this seemed groundbreaking to me when i first wrote it and now it seems absurd. it is also the last chapter! hope you like it.

_ jughead _

The summer passes, and Fred stays gone.

As impossible as it feels, Jughead is well versed in the knowledge that much of what seems impossible not only will come to pass, but must. His entire life was an exercise in survival that he never let himself believe he deserved. Always there was the glow, the peace, the guiding light of Fred Andrews, and it only made sense that that light, too, someday be extinguished. Archie and Betty walk around in open mouthed shock that the world could end, but Jughead can’t muster any real surprise after the initial jolt has passed. Everyone leaves. Fred’s gone too.

He knows it isn’t fair, knows thinking that way is only him trying to protect himself from the brutal agony of breath itself. Knows that Betty and Archie are right in their shellshock, that he is probably feeling it too and pretending not to. He is trying to protect himself. Somebody has to. Fred did for so long and now Fred is gone.

And the summer passes, all the same.

It has all the elements of what would have been a good summer, if the world hadn’t ended. There are only a handful of thunderstorms, and none of them unbearable; all of them over in under half an hour, as is gospel, or as should be gospel. Most of the days are bright and sunny and cloudless, but not, overall, scorching hot. Baseball weather. Picnic weather. Swimming in Sweetwater River weather, catching minnows weather, coming back to life and healing after two schoolyears and a summer between of pure unadulterated hell.

But it’s one thing after the next in Riverdale, so this summer, like the past one, like the schoolyear, like the year before, like, it is starting to feel like, maybe just life itself, is one of survival. Day to day. Every day is a new difficulty, he finds; a new discovery of what encompasses  _ grief,  _ grief like they’ve never known it before. It is a different flavor of the horrors they have already had; the wounds of his childhood, the day-to-day shocks and horrors of losing Jason Blossom and Midge and Dilton Doiley. This is somehow bigger than all of it, or perhaps all those losses are housed in this one. Perhaps they are feeling everything at the same time, and without Fred this time to guide them through it.

At least it is collective, shared. He and Archie and Betty spend every day together. Veronica drifts further and further, at least from Archie and him - he knows she and Betty are still close. Jughead doesn’t have much in way of an opinion on this, but he thinks that some relationships stand up against intolerable grief and pain, and some become collateral damage. He doesn’t think it’s anyone’s fault. 

He sees her and Reggie at Pop’s together midway through July, and they both look happy. He’s glad for them. Reggie’s more like Jughead than he’ll ever admit, and he’s one of the many in this town who spent much of their childhood and adolescence seeking refuge at the Andrews’. He deserves to be happy, and if it’s with Veronica, he supposes, stranger things have happened.

He mentions it to Archie, when he drives over with food.

“I saw Veronica at Pop’s,” he says, hoping he’s doing the right thing. The whole summer has been hoping he’s getting it right. Sometimes he does. Sometimes he doesn’t. The world couldn’t end more than it already has, so it always ends up all right.

Archie looks up from his burger with a somewhat inscrutable expression. “Really?”

“Yeah,” says Jughead, taking a long deep sip of this incredible lemonade drink Pops has begun stocking in the past couple of weeks. He thinks, but only for a second, of how Fred will never taste it. “They looked pretty happy.”

“We talked about taking a break,” said Archie.

“Yeah, you mentioned it.”

“Veronica and  _ Reggie, _ ” Archie says after a second. “Who would’ve thought?”

It feels like a foreign concept, but Jughead feels the beginning of a laugh in his throat. “I mean I guess they were kinda a thing earlier this year but - yeah, I mean - ”

“He just doesn’t seem like her  _ type. _ ”

“ _ She  _ doesn’t seem like  _ his  _ type. Reggie usually likes his girls…”

“Brainless,” supplies Archie.

They both laugh, for just a second, and settle back into silence. And when Jughead walks home that night, cutting through the Andrews’ backyard to what he still thinks of as Betty’s house, he thinks that it’s the first conversation they’ve had that’s not somehow, at least tangentially, connected to the loss seeping through everything like the air itself.

They talked about something different, he thinks. Something light and almost funny. They had laughed.

It feels a little bit like a betrayal, but it also feels a little bit like moving into the light. The next day they’re back in the trenches of it but he holds onto the memory of laughing with Archie in the kitchen, like a glowing pendant to carry him through the night, like there will be good again, or any of the other things he believed in his childhood.

\--

And so the summer passes, the days dripping slowly one after the other like a leaky faucet. They do their best to stay alive, even though it feels like a sacrilege to do so while Fred lies quiet in the ground, but as the days flow into months, the nights blending pain together with the aching, silent triumph of survival, they reach the same realization every morning with the dawn: there is no choice but to keep going.

“It’s what he would want,” Jughead says once, when it’s been thirty six hours and Archie hasn’t moved from his spot face down on the bed and Mary is crying in the kitchen again, downstairs, quietly, maybe because her son won’t move or maybe because her husband is dead. Betty and her mom are with her. And he’s upstairs, with Archie, trying to will him back to life.

Archie has done the same for him a million times after all. 

“He would want you to keep going,” says Jughead. It sounds so  _ stupid  _ even in his own head, because what Fred would want would be to be  _ alive. _

Archie raises his head, looks up at him, his eyes blank, the pain in Jughead’s chest is violent. “He would want to be alive.”

“I know, but he can’t be,” says Jughead, feeling like he is crossing some line he can’t uncross, breaking something but isn’t everything already broken? “and if he can’t be then he’d want you to be alive.”

Archie sits up fast and Jughead thinks he might hit him, but he melts instead, leaning onto his shoulder like that first night at the hospital, leaning against him with all his weight. Archie has lost a lot of weight in the past month.

Jughead wraps an arm around him and thinks they have to get him to eat more. Fred would be worried.

\--

There are good days and bad days. Days Archie won’t get out of bed and days they can laugh at the kitchen table. Days Jughead and Betty can steal away, sneak off to his house that used to be her house and pretend everything is normal, lose themselves in each other and pretend that there was ever a time before this grief, that there will ever be a time after. Days where they all have dinner together, at one or their other houses. 

They see less and less of Veronica and it sort of feels like she was never there at all. Jughead misses her, peculiarly. Jughead misses his own father, whose eyes are still vacant, who hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol since it happened but who seems to have lost himself anyway. Gladys is still here, and she’s taking care of him and Jellybean, so he can focus his energy, at least, on Archie. Jughead misses everyone. Jughead misses Fred. Jughead misses Fred. The days are thick like molasses and  _ everyone leaves, everyone leaves, everyone leaves,  _ it’s what he’s told himself since childhood, his fists balled up, preparing himself every second. There is  _ nothing  _ he can depend on - he tells himself this like a mantra, like a prayer. Not his mother. Not his father. (Deeper, darker, he remembers: not Archie, vanishing acts in eighth and tenth grade that they pretend never happened. Not Betty, who, before, loved Archie more. No one.  _ No one. _ )

And he didn’t really believe it. His dad loved him even if he was bad at it and his mom got food on the table more often than not and yes, Betty and Archie would leave, but they would always come home, come home, come home. But he told it to himself anyway because it was the only way not to shatter every time he was faced with something new.  _ Nothing  _ was reliable.  _ Nothing  _ would stand the test of the time. Telling himself that his whole life was the only thing that kept him clinging to some form of sanity when he left the trailer that night, knapsack on his back, and didn’t come home from work. He told himself nothing could be depended on and he found himself his own home at the Drive-In, at the school, and it  _ worked,  _ didn’t it?

But he hadn’t followed the  _ rules,  _ he realizes too late, he had broke his own rules, because all this time he was depending on something. He was depending on Fred, who never pretended to be better than he was and could therefore never fail in his eyes. Fred who made him sleep in the garage once but sat him down for a talk about it after and apologized the way a grown up had never apologized to him. Fred who took him in again and again and again and loved him like he loved Archie, Fred, who wasn’t supposed to die, Fred, who was supposed to make it, and of course he died, of course he left, everyone leaves, everyone leaves, everyone leaves.

Some days are better than others. On bad days he tries his hardest not to feel anything at all. On really bad days all he can do is grit his teeth and dig his fingernails into his palms like he’s picked up from Betty and repeat it to himself like a mantra like a prayer, reminding himself that it’s all he’s ever known:  _ everyone leaves, everyone leaves, of course he’s gone, it’s no surprise, everyone leaves, everyone leaves, everyone leaves. _

Veronica finds him crying at Pop’s in the beginning of August.

“Jughead?”

He looks up at her, too exhausted from telling himself all day that everyone leaves to even feel embarrassed about it. “Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” she says. She sits down, and he exhales, trying to get himself together. He doesn’t understand the crying cycle he’s on. He goes weeks without anything and then the floodgates open and drown him and the waves crash like he’ll never live again and then he crawls to the shore and it’s like he was never there.

Today is quieter. Today is tears sliding down his cheeks into his lemonade as he thinks of how Fred will never taste it again. He wipes irately at his face as Veronica folds her hands and sighs. He won’t cry, he decides, in front of Veronica.

He hasn’t cried in front of anyone since that first night at the hospital. He can’t do that to anyone.

She doesn’t say anything about him crying, but she passes him a small packet of tissues.

“How’s he doing?”

“As well as one can be expected,” says Jughead. “Under the circumstances.”  
“The circumstances.” Rather impetuously, she takes a sip of his lemonade. He is too surprised to say anything. “If I ask you something will you answer me honestly?”

“Yeah.”

“Am I the most heinous woman in the world for breaking up with Archie even though his dad just died?”

“if I tell you something, will you not take it the wrong way?”

“No. Or yeah. Whichever’s the affirmative.”

“This isn’t really about you.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry. But Archie doesn’t care about anything right now. He’s just..” Jughead doesn’t have the words for what Archie is. He reclaims his lemonade. “He doesn’t have any room for any feelings other than - you know.”

Veronica absorbs this. She takes another sip of his lemonade. “You guys stayed,” she says. “You and Betty. But I couldn’t take it. I didn’t know how to - how to help him. So I just..”

“It’s okay,” says Jughead, because it is, or maybe it isn’t, but one less person feeling like crap in this godforsaken town can only be a good thing. “Really. It is. He understands, I think. And it doesn’t make you a bad person. People just have.. different thresholds.”

Veronica sighs, lies her head on the table, lifts it and pushes Jughead’s lemonade back towards him. “I miss Fred,” she says.

“Everyone misses Fred,” says Jughead. He takes a sip of lemonade and pushes it back towards Veronica.

Veronica takes a sip. “Not like you miss Fred.”  
Jughead shrugs.

“Can you tell him I’m sorry?”

“I think he knows, Ronnie.” It’s an overly affectionate nickname for the situation but it fits.  _ Everyone leaves,  _ Jughead reminds himself, but he has a peculiar feeling like Veronica might come back to them.

“Can you tell him anyway?”

He takes one more sip and then pushes it back to her. “You can finish it,” he says. “I’ll tell him.”

“Thank you,” says Veronica quietly. “And can you tell him - ”

“He knows, Veronica. He knows.”

\--

School will start soon. He and Archie lie in the dark room, the smell of loss and dust still hanging in the air. Betty is home with Alice tonight. 

They’re quiet. It has been two months to the day, but neither of them mention it.

“I miss him,” says Jughead. It’s the first time he’s said it aloud. 

“I know,” says Archie. “I’m sorry, you know.”

“Sorry for what?”

“You know. All of it. Not meeting you at Pop’s on July fourth.”

“Not really relevant, Arch.”

“It is, though.” Archie seems older, quieter, darker. Jughead supposes he is all three but he doesn’t want to believe it. This shouldn’t have had to happen to Archie. He doesn’t have the guts for it, is all, and Jughead means it in the nicest way possible. He’s too good. He never had to learn that everybody leaves and this is a rotten way to do it.

He doesn’t say any of this though. Instead he rolls over on the air mattress until he’s looking up at him. “It isn’t.”

“It is,” says Archie. “I shouldn’t have done any of it, any of the things I did.”

“It wouldn’t - ”

“ - have made any difference. I know. I still shouldn’t have.”

Jughead can’t deny this so he says nothing. He misses Fred and he wonders if he’ll ever stop, or if it’ll tug at him forever, incessantly, until he’s dead too. He used to think sort of like that day would come sooner rather than later, not in an urgent way but in a way that felt inevitable, but now he knows he can’t die before Archie. So that’s settled, at least.

“School starts soon,” says Jughead.

“Yeah. Isn’t it so stupid how life is just going to keep going forever now and he’s going to stay dead?”

“It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

By the time Jughead remembers that he never passed on the message he thinks Archie might be asleep.

“Veronica’s sorry too,” he says anyway.

There’s a long silence and he’s almost sure now that Archie is asleep.

“I know.”

the end

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is technically a series and i have started part ii, but i havent written it in months. if enough people seem interested ill continue it since i have lots of time now! hope you liked it!


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